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The thing about this job is that a bright 10-year-old could do it, provided there was someone willing to carry heavy things on occasion. My salary is perfectly adequate for typing, filing, copying, and ordering supplies, which is what I do. You do not, however, pay me enough to think, too. You want thought, there’s going to have to be some renegotiation.

A while ago on Zompist’s conlang forum, we came up with a quick cypher we dubbed “Pig Elvish”. It’s fairly easy for the trained eye to read, but to the uninitiated it looks an awful lot like Tolkein’s Elvish–Sindarin, IMO, but some people think Quenya.

The algorhythm is simple: take the first letter and move it to the end. If the word is three letters or fewer, append “en”. If it’s four or more, append a random vowel. Mark any final Es with a diaresis (or umlaut, if you insist), and add acute accents at will. Change all Ks to C.

In any case, the posts to Zompist’s boards seem to have gone away, so I wanted to preserve the cypher. It falls down when presented with very long words, and is slightly lossy in that there’s no way for a simple search-and-replace to determine if this particular C should be turned into a K, but as cyphers go it’s easier to read than rot13.

The behavior of the paladin (who is a fairly recent addition) in the Order of the Stick has caused quite a bit of controversy on rec.games.frp.dnd. Then again, it’s degenerated into an alignment discussion, and that’s always good for a little flaming over there. There are OotS spoilers upcoming, so you don’t want to read this post if that’s a consideration.

The example that stirred up rgfd is Miko, who decided to take out a camp of sleeping ogres by waking them all up and insisting they arm themselves before she began killing them. Once they were all gathered around her, ready to fight, she had her party cast fireball and lighning bolt centered on her; she evaded with her |33t skillz, but the ogres were crisped.

So, the question is, is stereotypical paladin behavior not actually Lawful Good? Are paladins, in fact, Lawful StupidThis depends, IMO, in large part on how you interpret the paladin’s code. This piece of text requires a paladin to be Lawful Good and never willingly commit an evil act; to act honorably and respect legitimate authority; to help those who need it and punish those who harm the innocent.

The question arises when bits of the code come into conflict. It would arguably have better protected the ogres’ innocent prisoner to have killed them as they slept, so that none of them would have the chance to make him into a hostage or kill him lest he be a burden in running away. But it’s not honorable to kill sleeping opponents, right? (Even so, waking them up or even letting them arm themselves does not require that the paladin also insist that they eat breakfast so as not to be fighting on an empty stomach. But I digress.)

Would it, however, have been dishonorable? Most codes of honor don’t allow dishonorable behavior merely on the grounds that the opponent is himself dishonorable. There are, however, codes of honor which only govern interactions with one’s equals–bushido1 springs to mind, especially as Miko calls herself a samurai at one point. The ogres aren’t her equals, so honor needn’t apply, and she doesn’t have to worry about them being innocents and therefore protected by another bit of the paladin’s code; they’ve taken a prisoner for no reason, apparently, except that it’s fun to have someone around to beat up and/or eat. By that reading, she could have slit their throats with impunity and still been a paladin afterwards.

1: Yes, I’m simplifying greatly here, but I think the general point holds up.

I am extremely envious of Making Light, a blog which has some of the most entertaining and erudite discussions I’ve ever seen on the web. That being the case, I’m gonna post something and y’all should talk about it. It’s going to be depressing, because I’ve had this poem pointed out to me several times in the last few days and I think it’s a sign.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand;
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries
of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?